Mayfield leads funding of storage startup Portworx

Portworx, a San Francisco provider of storage software, emerged from stealth mode this week and announced it has raised $8 million in Series A funding. Mayfield Fund invested most of the round, and the other backers are undisclosed. Mayfield Managing Director Navin Chaddha is on the company board.

PRESS RELEASE

Portworx Emerges with the First ‘Container-Aware’ Storage Solution Purpose Built For Stateful Enterprise Applications

$8.5 Million Funding from Premier Investors Reinforces the Opportunity to Unleash the Power of Containers for Enterprise Deployment

“Enterprise applications are typically stateful and containers, by design are not,” said Justin Fitzhugh, former CIO of Jive Software and current VP of Technical Operations at Instart Logic. “Providing a stateful, scaleable, container-tuned infrastructure that complements containerized applications is the key to rapid deployment of containers in the enterprise world. Portworx represents the next generation of container technology specifically focused on accelerating deployment of containers in production.”

Portworx PWX is the first solution of its kind to enable the rapid deployment of containerized applications into production. With Portworx PWX, applications can be scaled rapidly without IT intervention, which enables businesses to meet the high growth demands of today’s markets.

The venture funding community has resonated with Portworx’s model, with an initial funding round of $8.5 million led by the Mayfield Fund.

“The container wave is the latest example of a disruptive paradigm which will create a new stack of platform companies, much like virtualization did,” said Navin Chaddha, Mayfield Managing Director and Portworx board member. “We are excited to champion the Portworx team and believe their unique software-defined storage solution has the potential to replace traditional SAN and NAS architectures.”

Stateful Applications Drive New Container-Aware Storage

As containers penetrate the enterprise, they surface new requirements of data persistence and management. Containers and data are not inherently portable or persistent across multiple nodes, storage performance is not tuned for containers, and storage features such as snapshots and replication are not container-specific, but rather LUN-generic.

Making Infrastructure Container-Ready

Containers can provide agility and increase density over current virtual machine-based solutions, but they have different needs in infrastructure: storage, networking, security and lifecycle management.

Portworx PWX overcomes a number of these fundamental challenges by making enterprise infrastructure software defined and container-ready. With Portworx PWX, IT and developers can provision storage to containers in an automated and Docker-centric way, eliminating the infrastructure tweaking and custom script writing that delay production deployment and scaling.

Portworx PWX is scalable and elastic storage for containerized applications and can work on-premise or in the cloud. Portworx PXC allows DevTest and production IT to use containers for running stateful applications such as databases, key value stores, and message queues to name a few.

“Both stateless and stateful applications can benefit from containerization. Our goal was to build storage infrastructure for containers from the ground up with a keen focus on the new requirements that containers and service oriented architectures create,” said Murli Thirumale, CEO of Portworx. “Building storage with container level granularity ensures storage policies can be applied at the container level, enabling greater agility, application state consistency, high availability, rolling upgrades, and high performance. In getting to this point, we had to break a few cherished notions about storage and virtualization architectures.”

Storage Built From The Ground Up For Containers

Portworx PWX converged and scale-out block storage is native to Docker, removing the requirement to manage external storage. Portworx takes a software-defined approach to provisioning and specifying storage requirements for containers, so administrators don’t have to provision storage separately from deploying applications. Portworx’s solution ensures a container’s data is persisted and replicated synchronously making it highly available, unlike other solutions where data is only replicated on demand. Storage availability and replication is coordinated with the scheduler so that containers can be orchestrated fluidly across machines and clouds.

With Portworx, enterprises can deploy stateful Dockerized applications in production

About Mayfield
Mayfield is a global venture capital firm with over $2.6 billion under management and has been championing entrepreneurs for more than 45 years. Mayfield invests primarily in early-stage consumer and enterprise-facing IT companies. Since its founding in 1969, the Firm has invested in more than 550 companies, resulting in over 110 IPOs and more than 150 mergers or acquisitions. For more information, please visit www.mayfield.com.